As the software industry has evolved over the years, there have been a myriad of ideas and methods for licensing and restricting access to digital content. Increasingly, the trend among content developers is to incorporate some form of digital rights management. Generally, digital rights management licensing schemes require some type of security measure in order to restrict access to protected digital content. Some of the commonly incorporated security measures include passwords, biometric thumbprints, encryption, digital signature techniques and serial numbers locked to hardware, such as individual PCs or dongles. Such security schemes, however, come at a high price. Not only do they typically place heavy burdens and ultimately inconvenience the user, they also can result in significant overhead costs because of the time and maintenance burdens on the developer and content provider.
In today's dynamic global environment, the critical nature of accuracy and speed can mean the difference between success and failure for a new software product or even a company. The process of deploying security schemes to protect access to digital content is long, involved and expensive. The difficulties of this process are compounded by the unique challenges that companies face to satisfy their customers expeditiously in order to survive in this dynamic global environment.
Content users want unfettered access to digital content without being required to undergo a burdensome authentication process. A licensed product that requires a user to navigate through a lengthy authentication process or security scheme will likely be unsuccessful. Moreover, users do not want to have to pay for the added cost of a security measure attached to digital content. Meanwhile, content providers want a security scheme that is easily implemented and enables them to effectively deploy content and garner a financial return without encumbering the content users. Software developers also want a mechanism that enables them to have a financial return. Thus, one of the most complicated aspects of developing a security model for deploying content is finding a scheme in which the cost benefit analysis accommodates all participants, i.e. the content user, content provider and software developer. At this time, the currently available schemes do not provide a user-friendly, developer-friendly and financially effective solution to restrict access to digital content.